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August 02, 2014

AAPT Summer meeting twitter analytics #aaptsm14

The Summer meeting of AAPT 2014 has come and gone. It was fantastic to get to engage with so many incredible teachers, to hear what they are doing in their classrooms, to catch up with old friends, and make some new ones.The use of twitter at the AAPT conferences has grown over the past few years. Rhett had a post at the end of the 2013 Winter meeting in New Orleans which showed only 116 tweets using the conference hashtag.This past meeting, there were over 1500 uses of the conference hashtag (#aaptsm14) according to Tweetarchivist. Using the tools from Tweetarchivist and checking some other analytics, I’m guessing that there were at least 42 users who used the conference hashtag to post to twitter not counting users who retweeted a post containing the hashtag.75% of the tweets came from the top 25 users. Who was the most prolific tweeter? @LCTTA had 202 tweets (representing just over 13% of all tweets), compared to AAPT’s official account, which had a respectable 145 tweets (9.6%). Third place went to @rutherfordcasey with 97 tweets (6.4%). The top 25 users are displayed below. There were a LOT of great tweets from many attendees (and many who were following from home). Check out some of these physics teachers and consider following them!I made a word cloud of the most popular words used. By far the most popular word was “students” if I counted the twitter abbreviation “Ss”. Also “learning” was slightly more popular than “teaching”

What about the use of twitter through the week? The amount of tweets during the day took a dip in the middle of the conference, then were strong on the last day:

Screenshot from Tweetarchivist

The most popular phone used to tweet was the iPhone (no idea what model). I’d love to give props to the attendees who were using either a Blackberry (2 tweets posted) or Windows Phone (1 tweet posted) but I have no idea which user was on that one. The breakdown of clients is shown below. I combined the iPad and iPhone results, although the iPhone posts dominated.Breakdown of twitter clients used:

iOS (all clients)

610

Tweetdeck

259

Android (all clients)

227

Web interface

152

Hootsuite

114

Other

148

Finally, for fun, I have the top mentions of users as well as the other popular hashtags used in posts also tagged with #aaptsm14 - The top users mentioned were @AAPTHQ with 118 mentions. This makes sense, as there were many people tweeting questions at AAPT. The next user with the most mentions was @rutherfordcasey, who was organizing many of the meet-ups as well as tweeting about great sessions he was in. The popular hashtags used included #perc2014 and #modphys.Top users by posts they made:

3 comments:

Thank you for posting this recap and analysis. Glad to see the Twitter usage continues to grow. As the person behind AAPT's social media presence, I always appreciate feedback and seeing engagement increase among both meeting attendees and those who are following the conversation.